Tuesday, February 20, 2007

I hate babys

Do you know why I hate babies? They remind me of my stuttering. I am 34, and unfortunately all my friends and my brother are having babies via their wifes. And the damn little things look at me with astonishment when I have a block and say "ehhhh". They look at me with their big eyes with a "ahh, what is this?". People that I know have the decency to ignore my stuttering, and people I do not know just try to hide their reactions. But you babies, you dont! So if any baby reads these lines, now you know why I hate you! ;-)

10 comments:

"People that I know have the decency to ignore my stuttering, and people I do not know just try to hide their reactions..."Hmm... I don't agree with that...Well, what is worse? Someone you don't know who pretends not to mind your stuttering and inside thinks you're an idiot... or someone who openly shows his irritation or surprise towards your stuttering and with that gives you the possiblity to react and put things right...The good things about kids is that they don't conceal their thoughts and emotions.. I've worked with children as an "animateur" (childrens play activities leader) years ago during my school holidays, and once I explained my stuttering to them I never had a problem with them later about it...I don't think it's always "decent" to conceal opinions or thoughts and behave as a hypocrit...Adults unfortunately often prefer to turn a blind eye on such "taboo subjects" like stuttering, or other disabilities and consequently they stay ignorant about the subject...

Babies will be attracted to the sound you are making and be interested in it, they'll look at you without the negative connotations of an older child and will more likely be attracted to the sound. Babies love noisy toys, hearing animal noises, songs etc They also like non-speech sounds too. How much do babies love people blowing raspberries!!?? and that's a non speech sound. Also if while you block you are looking at them they'll show interest in the eye contact and your interst in them while you speak.

On the one hand I really love babys and little kids ... I definitly want to have a family and own children.

But on the other side, when I meet children in public, they could scare the shit out of me. You just cannot predict if they just start talking to you or do something cute so that you are expected to say something:" Wants your name little fella? Already going to school?" or something like that.

There is an interesting study done by Ezrati-Vinacour, Platzky and Yairi, published in 2001, about the young child's awareness of stuttering-like disfluency. Here is the abstract:

The emergence of awareness of stuttering has been an important factor in theoretical and clinical considerations for early childhood stuttering. The present research program is aimed at studying the development of awareness of stuttering-like disfluency in normally fluent preschool and first-grade children using responses to video speech samples. A total of 79 children in five different age groups were asked to discriminate between the speech (fluent and disfluent) of two puppets, identify with the one who speaks like them, and evaluate the disfluent and fluent speech of the puppets. It was found that from age 3, children show evidence of awareness of the disfluency used in the study, but most children reached full awareness at age 5. Also, negative evaluation of disfluent speech is observed from age 4. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Do you guys even stutter when it is only the baby in the room to talk to? I only stutter when there is someone who can realize I am stuttering. Besides, babies are the only ones we can speak better than! Kids are usually cool about it too. I just tell them I have a stutter (might have to explain) then stutter away.